ICE shared Medicaid data it shouldn't have had with Palantir, new court revelations show

A federal court case has revealed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shared with data analytics firm Palantir Medicaid information that health authorities themselves had improperly handed over. According to new court filings, in January Medicaid officials transferred to immigration officials data that went beyond what a court had authorized, and ICE, in turn, shared that dataset with Palantir, whose ELITE application is used by ICE agents to display addresses of non-citizens who could be subject to deportation.

The revelation appears in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over the data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and ICE. Federal district judge Vince Chhabria, in California, had ruled in December that health authorities could share with ICE certain Medicaid data—such as addresses, dates of birth and immigration status—about immigrants without legal status from the states that filed the lawsuit. However, in May Chhabria temporarily paused that sharing after federal officials admitted that CMS had shared in January data exceeding what the court order permitted, including a dataset of Minnesota refugees that included U.S. citizens, and another transferred on January 7 containing data on millions of people, among them immigrants with legal status.

ICE was supposed to delete the improperly shared data, and Chhabria had scheduled a hearing for August to clarify the terms of his order. But in recent days, federal officials have admitted to new episodes of improper information sharing. In a recent court filing, the Department of Justice acknowledged that CMS mistakenly shared with ICE once again the same dataset of millions of names that it had already improperly shared in January, an error that, according to the government, occurred during an effort to share data from other states not involved in the lawsuit.

Alberto Briseno, section chief of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, stated that agency staff deleted the file after discovering it and that it was not used for law enforcement purposes. However, a day later the agency conducted a broader search and discovered that six users still retained a copy of the January 7 dataset. Briseno said he was not aware of any additional copies, but acknowledged that recent searches "have highlighted the technical difficulties of ensuring that every possible variant of the file has been searched for and located," adding that ICE "will continue making good-faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future."

At the same time, the Department of Justice is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of non-citizens, which could include all immigrants who are not lawful permanent residents, citizens, or who do not have some other form of permanent status. The Democratic attorneys general responded in their motion that "ICE's inability to identify the Medicaid records in its possession undermines any claim that the agency deserves greater access to this data," and warned that "each new disclosure of a violation of the order makes it even harder for the plaintiff states to trust the defendants' ability to maintain and protect this data in accordance with the order."

Palantir, for its part, issued a statement to NPR asserting that "our customers control their own data and manage access to it. When Palantir employees are granted access to a customer's dataset, it is solely to help integrate and analyze that data—which is what our software does—not to store it or use it for our own purposes." The company confirmed that the dataset in question "was purged in accordance with government instructions." The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the data transfer to Palantir.

According to a declaration from California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich, when the plaintiffs asked what steps federal officials had taken to ensure that Palantir and other contractors had deleted the data, the defendants responded that the information had been shared through a Microsoft Teams chat and that the shared data had been deleted from that chat. Rich included in her declaration a document obtained during discovery showing a redacted transcript of what appears to be ICE personnel requesting that Palantir delete the file.

At an April 30 hearing, Chhabria had already warned that the federal government would not be able to continue using Medicaid data for deportation purposes if it kept improperly sharing information about citizens and legal immigrants. "If the federal government can't be careful enough, then it can't use the information, okay?" the judge said at the time.